You Have a Corporate Vision – but Can You See?

This past Friday morning, I was sitting with a client in his backyard enjoying a coffee before we were about to begin our day together working on his business.

He told me some fabulous stories about how he started his company. Through a series of random events, opportunities, risks, and decisions, he had built a very successful company from the ground up.

We’ve been working together for close to a year now, and we’ve had some incredible successes during that time. We spent the majority of our time together drawing up concrete action plans, steps, and responsibilities to support the next phase of dramatic business growth.

On my drive home, I pondered my experience with this client and some of my other clients.

My immediate reactions were that my most successful clients routinely take the time, and utilize outside resources (me), to reassess their current trajectory and strategic goals, and ensure that both they and their teams are working to achieve them.

When I thought more about it, I realized that more often than not, I find a CEO, Owner, or President who is doing four specific things remarkably well.

1. They’ve defined the strategic vision of their company, and that includes both short-term and long-term goals.

2. They do what’s required to correct their course when it’s clear that the company isn’t moving towards their vision.

3. They communicate the vision & the mid-course corrections THROUGHOUT the organization

4. Finally, and likely most important, when they need it, they’re utilizing outside help to get there.

Here’s a tangible example.

I recently started working with a new client whose major strategic goals include increasing sales and reducing attrition. Working together we’ve been able to find the areas that were lacking and formulate the plans to necessary to achieve those goals.

But without the action plan, the vision is useless.

He recognized this, and we’re now well on our way.

Here are this week’s key questions for you think about:

What are you doing on a weekly basis to make sure you’re closer to your vision than you were last week?

What are you doing to ensure that you know when progress towards that vision has stalled, and what are you doing to restart it?

Or better yet,

If no progress towards your vision has been made in the last month, how would you know?